Onename founders Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali were recently interviewed on an episode of Epicenter Bitcoin , and the early portion of the conversation focused on the duo’s overall goals for their blockchain-based identity system. While most people see Onename as a company for online identity and login verification, Shea and Ali’s vision goes far beyond that. The New York-based team see their project as a way to help redecentralize the Internet by giving people a form of online ID over which they have complete control. Shea and Ali expanded on these points during their discussion with Epicenter Bitcoin co-hosts Sébastien Couture and Meher Roy .
Problems with Centralization on the Internet
Before explaining how Onename can help redecentralize the Internet, Ali explained the problems facing the Web right now. Although the Internet started out as a generally decentralized platform, centralization has started to creep into the system over the past fifteen years:
“When talking about the grand vision — if you go back to the late ‘90s, you would see that the Internet used to be a much more decentralized place. People would go visit websites that were hosted on different servers, different hosting providers, and in the last fifteen years, one of the things that has happened is that it’s becoming more and more centralized in the sense that everything, all forms of communication, are going through certain, central companies like Google [or] Facebook.”
Ali explained that it is important to make sure that people do not have to rely on large, centralized institutions in the online world:
“Most user data is actually also with these companies, so one of the things that really excites us to work on this technology is the potential to kind of like redecentralize the Internet — give the power back to the people, so […]
